The biggest thing missing from Black Mirror: Bandersnatch’s horror story about a career in games
Warning: spoilers ahead for some of the endings of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch
Careers in game design are widely considered dream jobs — one of the ultimate versions of getting paid to do what you love. Black Mirror’s new interactive episode Bandersnatch lets you experience one — and then concludes that a career in the arts is a nightmare dystopia with no escape. The new Netflix project is a painful parable about how creating commercial art leads to misery, despair, and the destruction of everyone and everything you love.
And yet as dark as Bandersnatch is, its picture of the creative life still isn’t bleak enough. For actual working artists, Black Mirror often looks too optimistic — not least because it oddly never presents art as work....